Social Media

TWITTER PURGE: Top Twitter User Unfollows 106,000 People

Feeling overwhelmed by Twitter? You're not alone...although you probably aren't trying to follow messages from over 100,000 people. Social media addict Robert Scoble was, and decided to unfollow them all at once.

Scoble's situation is somewhat unique. Until recently, he was auto-following everyone who followed him, a practice that was accepted in Twitter's early days but eventually led to a lot more spam in the system (users could set up spam accounts to follow people knowing some accounts would auto-follow them back). For Scoble, this led to a situation where he was following over 100,000 people, most of whom he didn't know. Worse, some were spam accounts that filled his Twitter DM inbox with junk.

Twitter doesn't allow you to mass unfollow natively, so Scoble had an automated script written to do it for him. He writes of the experience:

On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back. They did that so fast that I assume they are just bots that are looking to increase their follower numbers. I knew I’d lose them, but that’s sort of why I did it. People who are following me just to get another count on their follower numbers are just plain, well, lame.

But it’s worse than that. When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page.

Much like MySpace, it seems, users are learning that having 100,000 "friends" you've never met is much less valuable than connecting with a select number of people you know well.

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